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The local authors fair at Crawley Library.

Crawley Library as you can see is a rather splendid place, very new, spacious and well planned. But I rather blotted my copy book at the Local authors fair there last Saturday. For a start I arrived over an hour late, I’d eaten something on Friday which disagreed with me and it caught up with me in the middle of the night, so I was feeling distinctly weak and washed out at breakfast time and didn’t dare to eat anything but settled for a cup of black tea. I missed a train at Clapham Junction and had to wait for the next one and by the time I got to Crawley, I’d become such a wimp that I hired a cab to find the library for me.

The fair was held in an upstairs room and someone had very kindly set out my books on the table ready for me and I was greeted with some concern by Clair Stanton and Alan Goodman, the two organisers of the event, who rushed at once to provide coffee and cake to sustain me and settled me in at my post. I appreciated that very much, being a diabetic and by then rather in need of sustenance.

The event was already under way of course and extremely noisy. There were only two authors there who were published the old fashioned way, me and a lovely friendly lady called Sheila Rance (Hi there Sheila) who writes children’s books and is published by Orion. I knew two of the self published authors from the Chichester group which is called ‘Chindie’, but the others were unknown to me.

It was good to meet up with fans and talk to them, because I enjoy to talking to my fans but it was extremely difficult. 22 authors all talking at once to push their wares makes a heck of a row. There were times when I simply couldn’t hear what the people who’d come to see me were saying. The level of noise is a major problem at such events and I don’t know what the answer is. But I was treated kindly throughout and the two Chindie members drove me home for which I was extremely grateful, because by then I was beginning to feel like a piece of chewed string.